We’re All Infected: Legal Personhood, Bare Life and The Walking Dead

This article argues that greater theoretical attention should be paid to the figure of the zombie in the fields of law, cultural studies and philosophy. Using The Walking Dead as a point of critical departure concepts of legal personhood are interrogated in relation to permanent vegetative states, bare life and the notion of the third person. Ultimately, the paper recommends a rejection of personhood; instead favouring a legal and philosophical engagement with humanity and embodiment. Personhood, it is suggested, creates a barrier in law allowing individuals in certain contexts (and in certain embodied states) to be rendered non-persons and thus outside the scope of legal rights. An approach that rejects personhood in favour of embodiment would allow individuals to enjoy their rights without being subject to such discrimination. It is also suggested that the concept of the human, itself complicated by the figure of the zombie, allows for legal engagement with a greater number of putative rights claimants including admixed embryos, cyborgs and the zombie

Public History and the study of Law: reviewing The Limehouse Golem (2017). Directed by Juan Carlos Medina [film]. 109 min. UK. Production: Lipsync Post, Number 9 Films.

This is an interdisciplinary discussion, looking at the use of popular history for the critical understanding of the reconstruction of crime and patriarchal hierarchy. By way of reviewing the recent movie The Limehouse Golem, it illustrates the significance of theoretically engaging with a period crime fiction movie. It is argued that this assessment is less relevant in terms of producing historical understanding; rather, what may be a fiction, reveals instead our own contemporary cultural fixations

Sketching women in court: The visual construction of co-accused women in court drawings

This paper explores the visual construction and representation of co-accused women offenders in court drawings. It utilises three case studies of female co-defendants who appeared in the England and Wales court system between 2003 and 2013. In doing so this paper falls into three parts. The first part considers the emergence of the sub-discipline, visual criminology and examines what is known about the visual representation of female offenders. The second part presents the findings of an empirical investigation, which involved engaging in a critical, reflexive visual analysis of a selection of court drawings of three female co-offenders. The third part discusses the ways in which the court artists' interpretation, the conventions of court sketching, and motifs of female offenders as secondary actors, drew on existing myths and prejudices by representing the women as listening, remorseless ‘others’

The Semiotic Fractures of Vulnerable Bodies: Resistance to the Gendering of Legal Subjects

While the turn to vulnerability in law responds to a recurrent critique by feminist scholars on the disembodiment of legal personhood, this article suggests that the mobilization of vulnerability in the criminal courts does not necessarily offer female drug mules a direct path to justice. Through an analysis of sentencing appeals of female drug mules in England and Wales, this article presents a feminist critique of the dispositif of the person and its relation to vulnerability. Discourses on drug mules’ vulnerability mobilize the trope of the colonial victim in need of protection, which is often translated into legal mercy. But mercy is rather an expression of biopower which inscribes not only fragility onto the bodies of drug mules by figuring them as exemplar paradigms of colonial subjectivity, but also reinvigorates the dispositif of gender implicit in the legal person. In this set-up, it would appear as if law and politics totalize the registers of life, in this case the contours of vulnerable body. The article suggests we must revisit the image of the wounded body in order to carve out a space for resistance. Drawing on Elaine Scarry and Judith Butler, it suggests vulnerable bodies are marked by a semiotic openness, which renders them subject to appropriation but also able to signify the precarity produced by the law through their resistance to representation

Bionic bodies, posthuman violence and the disembodied criminal subject

This article examines how the so-called disembodied criminal subject is given structure and form through the law of homicide and assault. By analysing how the body is materialised through the criminal law’s enactment of death and injury, this article suggests that the biological positioning of these harms of violence as uncontroversial, natural, and universal conditions of being ‘human’ cannot fully appreciate what makes violence wrongful for us, as embodied entities. Absent a theory of the body, and a consideration of corporeality, the criminal law risks marginalising, or altogether eliding, experiences of violence that do not align with its paradigmatic vision of what bodies can and must do when suffering its effects. Here I consider how the bionic body disrupts the criminal law’s understanding of human violence by being a body that is both organic and inorganic, and capable of experiencing and performing violence in unexpected ways. I propose that a criminal law that is more receptive to the changing, technologically mediated conditions of human existence would be one that takes the corporeal dimensions of violence more seriously and, as an extension of this, adopts an embodied, embedded, and relational understanding of human vulnerability to violence

Our legal lives as men, women and persons

To be recognised as a legal person is to be individualised: it is to be rendered a separate and distinct being, the unitary bearer of rights and duties. By contrast, to be assigned a legal sex is to be grouped with others, to be placed within one of only two sexes, as either a man or a woman, a necessarily crude dichotomy. It is to be legally defined by the characteristics we are said to share with half the human population rather than regarded as an individual in our own right. This paper entails a critical comparative analysis of the legal concept of person and the legal concept of sex: of maleness or femaleness. It questions the logic and defensibility of this double characterisation of our legal lives. How can law reconcile its deep commitment to individualism with its persisting commitment to a two-sex system

The Legal Person After the Sexual Revolution: Criminal Law, the Church and the Family

In this talk co-sponsored by the IFLS and the Osgoode Colloquium on Law, Religion & Social Thought, Professor Ngaire Naffine of the University of Adelaide Faculty of Law explores the ways in which, through the regulation of intimate and married life, “the criminal law, the Church, and the family conspired” to deny liberal legal personhood to women

The Gorilla in Our Midst: Inattentional Blindness to Sanctioned Brutality in Criminal Law

Professor Ngaire Naffine, The University of Adelaide, deliver the Pierre Genest Memorial Lecture at Osgoode Hall Law School on October 1, 2012 on the topic, The Gorilla in our Midst: Inattentional Blindness to Sanctioned Brutality in Criminal Law . Criminal law asserts a basic and universal human right to bodily integrity, but it has simultaneously declared husbands to be immune from prosecution for the rape of their wives. This fundamental tension in criminal jurisprudence persisted late into the twentieth century, with little comment from criminal legal scholars or jurists. Those who spoke up, tended to support the immunity. In May 2012, the Australian High Court revisited the immunity and questioned its very existence in Australia. However there was no Nuremberg moment in which this criminal legal wrong to married women was acknowledged and strongly condemned. Professor Naffine uses the Harvard experiment of the (unobserved) gorilla in the basket ball game to explain this inattentional blindness to sanctioned sexual violence at the heart of criminal law

The Legal Person After the Sexual Revolution: Criminal Law, the Church and the Family

In this talk co-sponsored by the IFLS and the Osgoode Colloquium on Law, Religion & Social Thought, Professor Ngaire Naffine of the University of Adelaide Faculty of Law explores the ways in which, through the regulation of intimate and married life, “the criminal law, the Church, and the family conspired” to deny liberal legal personhood to women